Warren Sonbert Films to Play at Glasgow International – Divided Loyalties Accompanied by Live Score, April 23

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce Warren Sonbert screenings to take place at the 2016 Glasgow International, a biennial festival of contemporary art. HALL OF MIRRORS (1966) will be shown together with his silent film DIVIDED LOYALTIES (1978) that will be accompanied by a live score, performed by Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster. The event will take place April 23.

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.

From the Glasgow International Website:

"In a special 16mm screening Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster will be performing a live mix in quadrophonic sound to score Warren Sonbert’s silent film Divided Loyalties. This performance of an original sound composition to accompany Sonbert’s silent film is made possible with the special permission of The Estate of Warren Sonbert. The performance will be accompanied by a screening of the Sonbert short Hall of Mirrors with its original sound.

Sonbert built upon his early experiments in camera movement, lighting, and framing to create brilliantly edited masterworks that encompass not only his New York milieu, but also the larger sphere of human activity. In these films he commented upon such contemporary issues as art and industry, news reportage and its effect on our lives, and the interrelationship between the creative arts. His late works culminated in symphonic montages (both silent and sound) that unite universal human gestures into singular works of moving image artistry."

DIVIDED LOYALTIES (1978)

For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective

All Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert

Warren Sonbert Retrospective at The Wexner Center for the Arts: January 20th & 27th, 2016

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the program lineup for the Warren Sonbert Retrospective taking place at The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio on January 20th & 27th.

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.

From The Wexner Center Website:

"One of the most original and influential figures in American experimental cinema, Warren Sonbert began making films in 1966 as a precocious NYU student who found himself in the midst of Andy Warhol’s Factory. After graduating, he took his Bolex camera on his travels as he perfected a complex style of filming and editing that lyrically transforms mundane-yet-beautiful details into larger emotions, concepts, and visual splendors. Sonbert’s influences ranged from rock-and-roll to opera, from Douglas Sirk to Stan Brakhage. This vital retrospective featuring all newly restored prints cements his reputation as one of the most innovative and notable experimental filmmakers of the last half of the 20th century.

As a testament to his ongoing vitality, the spring 2015 issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media is devoted to Sonbert’s writing. Pick up your copy at the Wexner Center Store."

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WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO (1966)

Columbusalive.com wrote on Warren Sonbert in preparation for the event and interviewed Jon Gartenberg on Sonbert's career:

"Following the filmmaker’s death in 1995 of AIDS, Sonbert’s partner, Ascension Serrano, tasked Jon Gartenberg, through the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, with the preservation of Sonbert’s work. Gartenberg first became associated with Sonbert’s films while Gartenberg was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, during which time he acquired several of Sonbert’s films.

'[Sonbert's] idea was to engage the viewer in an accumulation of different shots that were not specifically narrative, but that were linear and poetic,' Gartenberg said. 'But more than any experimental filmmaker, his work was less about image abstraction and more about an experimental approach to narrative structure, through how he built a montage of images and scenes.'"

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For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective

All Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert

Canyon Cinema Feature on Framework Issue 56.1 – Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings

Framework issue 56.1 devoted entirely to Warren Sonbert was featured in Canyon Cinema's latest newsletter. Canyon Cinema has 16mm prints of Sonbert's work, available for rental.

Newsletter: http://ow.ly/WBu3X
Tumblr: http://canyon-cinema.tumblr.com

Jon Gartenberg Lecture for NYU Film Production Class on The Cinematic Oeuvre of Warren Sonbert

Yesterday, Jon Gartenberg was invited as a guest lecturer in Lynne Sach's NYU film production class on the cinematic oeuvre of Warren Sonbert. Below is an image of Jon with Lynne towards the end of the lecture.

Jon Gartenberg & Lynne Sachs

Jon Gartenberg With Nicola Mazzanti on First Night of Warren Sonbert at The L'Age d'Or Film Festival

Jon Gartenberg presenting with Nicola Mazzanti (director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive) on the first night of the Warren Sonbert retrospective as part of the L'Age d'Or Film Festival in Brussels. Below is also an image of Warren Sonbert's film WHIPLASH on the monitor of the festival theater's lobby.

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Jon Gartenberg & Nicola Mazzanti

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Shot of WHIPLASH on TV monitor.

Warren Sonbert Retrospective at the L'Age d'Or festival in Brussels October 4th to 9th, 2015

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the program lineup for the Warren Sonbert Retrospective taking place at the L'Age d'Or Film Festival in Brussels, Belgium from October 4th to 9th. Each program in this series will be introduced by Jon Gartenberg, a noted authority on Sonbert's oeuvre.

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.

From the Festival Catalogue:

"Warren Sonbert was one of the most original and influential figures in American experimental cinema. He began making films in 1966 while studying at the University of New York. Sonbert himself has taught filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College. He also wrote critical reviews on opera and film for San Francisco weeklies. His first films, in which he captured the spirit of his generation, were first inspired by academia, later by the figures of the Warhol scene.

THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1967)

In the late 1960s, when Sonbert began to take his Bolex camera with him on travels, his cinematic strategy changes and he begins to weave his travel images together with sequences of previous films. It’s a period during which his work shows the filmmaker’s capacity to turn his first experiences into more accomplished works, using his characteristic ‘polyvalent cutting’, a technique where each sequence ‘can be combined with ambient sequences with, potentially, many dimensions.’ Sonbert drew on his early experiences on camera movement, light and design to create brilliantly cut masterpieces that not only zoom in on his New York environment but also, more generally, on the sphere of human activity. These are films in which he comments on art and industry, news reporting and its effects on our lives, or the interaction between artistic disciplines. His last works culminate in symphonic (silent or sound) arrangements that unite the universal gestures of Men into unique combinations. Over the course of his career, Sonbert made 18 films. Before his death in 1995, he worked on WHIPLASH. This last film was completed by filmmaker Jeff Scher, following Sonberts precise instructions."

WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO (1966)

HONOR AND OBEY (1988)

Copies of "Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings" (published by Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media and guest edited by Jon Gartenberg) will be available for sale at the festival. For more information on the special issue of Framwork click here.

For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective

"Where Did Our Love Go? Films of Warren Sonbert" – Program at Media City in Toronto

"Where Did Our Love Go? Films of Warren Sonbert" program at Media City in Toronto, Ontario that played last week. Program was curated by Jeremy Rossen and the films were introduced by Carla Harryman, one of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets with whom Sonbert interacted in his artistic practice.

Framework 56.1 – Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings. Now Available from Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media has just released its latest issue devoted entirely to the writings of avant-garde artist Warren Sonbert. The journal features reproductions of Sonbert's original typed, handwritten and published documents. The issue is guest edited by Jon Gartenberg and is organized into sections related to Sonbert's interests in art, music, poetry, travel and film.

Click here for more information on this Framework publication.

Below is an excerpt from Jon Gartenberg's introduction to the issue entitled A Delicate Balance: Warren Sonbert's Creative Legacy:

"For the very first time, a selection of writings by filmmaker Warren Sonbert is assembled together in this special edition of Framework. Although known primarily as an experimental filmmaker, Sonbert and his career extended deeply into other realms of the creative arts. He was an opera, music, and film critic; a kindred spirit to the Language poets; a screenplay author who adapted Strauss’s 1940–41 opera Capriccio; a collaborator on other filmmaker’s productions (Gerard Malanga’s In Search of the Miraculous [US, 1967] and Charles Henri Ford’s Johnny Minotaur [US, 1971]); an essayist on both the fine and performing arts; and a leading theoretician on cinematic montage. The objective of these collected writings, then, is to expand the narrow categorization of Sonbert as a now- deceased, marginalized experimental filmmaker into a broader reconsideration of his entire creative career. This endeavor should serve to reposition his legacy as a truly Renaissance thinker who articulated, in both profound and coherent fashion, how diverse forms of artistic expression can be so deeply connected to the human condition. 

Even for students of film history who are familiar with Sonbert’s cinematic output, the texts assembled in this publication are sure to be a revelation. “Film Syntax,” Sonbert’s most renowned essay, which so lucidly articulates his unique theory of montage, has been printed numerous times in various publications. Aside from this text, however, the other articles authored by Sonbert and reproduced herein are from more obscure publications or now defunct journals, including Shiny, Motion Picture, Tikkun, CinemaNews, Spiral, and the NY Film Bulletin. In addition, numerous unpublished notes, reflections, and essays that were authored by Sonbert—both handwritten and typed—have been gathered together to be published for the first time in this journal…

…We have organized Sonbert’s writings into the following broad classifications: art, travel, music, poetry, and film. These are not designed to be rigid categoriza- tions, but rather as points of departure to demonstrate Sonbert’s facility in his dialogue between all the art forms. Our inclusion of the travel category represents the central role Sonbert’s own journeys across time and space—both physical and creative—played in the development of the artist’s own practice of his craft.9 Only in considering Sonbert’s entire creative output as a coherent entity—filmed, written, and spoken, as well as his lived experiences through travel—can we truly appreciate his genius both as an artist and humanist."

GME is the exclusive representative of the estate of Warren Sonbert. For more information on the Warren Sonbert project see our programming page.

Warren Sonbert Program at Indiana University

Warren Sonbert program at Indiana University's program "An Evening Of Warren Sonbert Short Films", Friday, Nov. 21st at 6:30 pm. Films of Warren Sonbert's to be shown include AMPHETAMINE (1966), NOBLESSE OBLIGE (1981), and WHIPLASH (1997).

Warren Sonbert Films Screening in Paris Tribute to the "New York Underground"

Warren Sonbert Films Screening in  Paris Tribute to the New York Underground     Warren Sonbert with his film camera Two of Warren Sonbert's films, Amphetamine and Where Did Our Love Go? will be shown in the retrospective "New York Underground" organized by Documentaire sur grand écran, as part of a tribute to Bleecker Street Cinema.  Both films are screening in Paris at the Filmothèque du Quartier Latin on Saturday evening, November 23.       Beginning at age 15, Warren Sonbert, a Brooklyn native, regularly attended screenings at the Bleecker Street cinema.  He became friendly with the management, and, in 1965, at age 16 (!) he served as Editor-in-Chief of a special edition of New York Film Bulletin  on Jean-Luc Godard.  This magazine was regularly edited in the basement of the Bleecker Street Cinema, and this issue (number forty-six) already reveals Sonbert's precocious genius and deep appreciation of the voice of the cinematic auteur, as revealed in his one-on-one interview with Godard: "WS:  In Truffaut's La Peau Douce various banal objects (telephones, lights, shoes) play a significant role.  Is there any similarity in the continual presence of spherical objects and motions in Bande a Part? J-LG:  No, all that was accidental.  But you know, now that I think of it, what you said about round objects often seen in Bande a Part: the last shot is of the world which is round, you know - so maybe you're right."  AMPHETAMINE (1966) In February 1966, as a filmmaking student at New York University, Sonbert shot his first film (with Wendy Appel), entitled Amphetamine, about which he wrote, "First film, heavily influenced by Godard and Warhol - designed to shock".  His next movie, Where Did Our Love Go?, is, according to film critic James Stoller, "both a valentine and a farewell to a generation".  WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? (1966) Warren Sonbert subsequently showed his films at Bleecker Street cinema.  Where Did Our Love Go? contains the only known footage of the interior of this movie theater during the period that it was founded and owned by Lionel Rogosin. Before he turned 21, Sonbert also secured a complete retrospective showing of his films at The Film-Makers' Cinematheque; the film critic for Variety wrote:  "Probably not since Andy Warhol's 'The Chelsea Girls' had its first showing at the Cinematheque...almost a year and a half ago has an 'underground' film event caused as much curiosity and interest in N.Y's non-underground world as did four days of showings of the complete films of Warren Sonbert at the Cinematheque's new location on Wooster St. last weekend (Thurs. - Sun. Jan 25-28).  And as before, the crowds (many turned away each night) were attributed to press reports." For a trailer of the "New York Underground" retrospective, featuring filmmaker Warren Sonbert, click here. For full program information, click here. For more information about Warren Sonbert & an international touring retrospective of his films, click here, or contact:  info@gartenbergmedia.com.